Open Data Institute | News

The Open Government Partnership events capped an astonishing week for open data, with so many announcements that I suspect it will take weeks to digest them all. I wanted to highlight a few that are particularly important within the UK.  Thursday saw the release of the UK’s National Action Plan. This includes, as announced by David Cameron, a commitment to publicly publish a register of beneficial ownership, ie information about who owns which companies. There is still some detail to be worked out about this commitment. As Chris Taggart has argued, this information must be published not just publicly but as open data if it is to achieve its potential impact ... Friday saw the release by Companies House of accounts data as open data. This is another amazingly rich source of information about how companies are working. This is important for corporate transparency, but it will be interesting to see how other organisations might analyse this data, as it provides a picture of the state of the UK economy at a very granular level.  What we are gradually seeing with corporate information is an accretion of datasets that can be linked together, through the company registration number, to provide greater insight into how individual companies and the economy as a whole are working. This includes ... Open data is a cornerstone of the UK’s Open Government Partnership National Action Plan for the next two years. There are five commitments explicitly within the 'Open Data' section, but many others focus on publishing more and better open data, including through legislation.gov.uk and OpenDataCommunities ... A report on the ongoing development of the UK’s National Information Infrastructure (NII) was also published last week. It’s now possible to filter the 14,000+ datasets listed on data.gov.uk down to the 280 which are classified as NII ... The final set of announcements from last week that I want to draw attention to here are the announcement of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Open Data Index 2013 and the Open Data Barometer 2013 which was developed by the Web Foundation in collaboration with us here at ODI. (Dave Tarrant has done a great interactive visualisation if you want to explore the Barometer results.) ..."